Summer is Over, Huddle Up for Strong 4th Quarter

It’s football season and everyone is getting their weekly lineups together. Returning players know the plays, the coaches, the ins and outs of the season. Rookies however are still learning the team strategy, working hard to feel comfortable on the field, and figuring out what it takes to score big. They’re getting an education in these first few weeks of the season.

This same concept applies to bringing new marketing professionals up to speed when they come aboard, or are “Onboarding.” Take a break from setting your fantasy lineup and check out this blueprint for a new employee. Not only will it help the marketer, but it might also provide some new insights for your coaching staff, or marketing team.

The Onboarding Blueprint

Give the Overview – Bring new employees up to speed on the basics: what the company does, its size, its target market, which marketing channels it uses, etc. Sound familiar? This is probably your corporate deck. Invest an hour or two and walk through it with your new marketing person.

Review Success Metrics – Train on the KPIs that Marketing is responsible for and explain how those apply to the new hire. For example, if monthly MQLs are what the CMO uses to benchmark success, make sure the new webinar manager is creating webinars that push new leads to MQL.

Introduce the Employee to Sales – Giving Marketing the perspective of Sales helps build the ever important alignment. Maybe have the new hire sit in for some sales calls and meet with 3-4 Sales reps, including the business development reps and the outside team.

Train on Marketing Technology Platforms- Do a run-through of the marketing automation software and other digital marketing technologies such as webinar management tools to give the new employee an idea of technologies used at the organization.

Ease the fear of creating new emails or target lists by bringing in your marketing operations guru to provide the overview. The idea here is not to go deep with training but to provide an overview of all the technologies the marketing team utilizes. This helps promote cross functional expertise.

Shadow Someone – Have the new employee spend a day or half a day with an experienced marketing employee in the same department. This should give the new hire a comfort level with the job function he or she will be performing.

Deep Dive into Training – After the first five steps, the new employee should have a pretty decent idea of what is happening at the organization. Now it’s time to dive deeper into the new hire’s specific function. The new hire should review any documentation on processes and begin diving into the day-to-day technologies. For example, a new marketing operation manager would dive into the marketing automation platform to learn how to import lists, set lead scoring, adjust nurturing and more. Many digital marketing technology providers offer some online training, so make sure the new employee takes advantage of that.

Review and Reinforce Goals – After a week plus of training, the new hire will feel like he or she is drinking from a fire hose. The new marketer will not retain everything so now is a good time to provide a refresher on goals, KPIs and other top points. As a manager, this step offers you the peace of mind to trust your new hire to follow process accurately.

In order to successfully bring your new employees on board, training is needed. Whether you use a blueprint like above, or create your own, set up your employee for success with proper training.

And next time someone on your team makes a “rookie mistake” try to remember everything they’re learning and cut them some slack!

Jeff Coveney

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